In the Dead of Night
by a-big-apple
Summary: Ryoko's sleepless night takes a tricky turn when little Mayuka wakes from a strange dream, wondering whether or not she has a mommy. Ryoko knows she shouldn't lie--but how can she tell Mayuka the truth? A post-Daughter-of-Darkness oneshot.


So instead of working on the other stories I'm in the middle of, I suddenly got inspired to write a Daughter of Darkness oneshot. Go figure! Anyway, here it is, just a quick scene that takes place a few years after Mayuka's rebirth.

~o~o~o~

In the Dead of Night

It's the kind of night when I just want to sit up on the roof and watch the stars, you know? The house is quiet and still, and it's hours before sunrise. Except it's chilly and pouring rain outside, and bad weather isn't really my cup of tea. So I sit on the couch in the dark instead, sprawled across the length of it, flipping through the TV channels with the volume down low. I settle on a Juraian soap opera—it must be the middle of the afternoon there—and wonder for the millionth time about why Washu decided to design me without a physical need for sleep. I can sleep sometimes, if I put my mind to it or drink inhuman amounts of sake, but more often than not I watch the sky, or soap operas, or other people dreaming. I guess in the years since Mayuka was born, I've gotten used to being awake through the night.

I've got better hearing than anyone else in the house, so the sound on the TV shouldn't have been loud enough to wake anyone, but after a while my ears catch a child's soft breath on the stairs and a hand sliding along the banister. A moment later she's climbing up on the couch with me, and lays her little head on my chest.

"Auntie Ryoko?"

"Yeah, Mayuka-chan?"

"Do I have a mommy?"

The question catches me so off guard that for a moment all I can do is stare down at the top of her head. Her hair is sticking out at crazy angles, and her little body is warm and languid with sleep, and I wonder what prompted her to get out of bed to ask me this. She's smart, though, and she answers before I can ask the question. "I had a funny dream."

"A funny dream?"

"About a big tree. And a furry woman. You were there, and Auntie Sasami, and Daddy."

"Ah…hmm. You know, Mayuka-chan, I think this might be a question you should ask your Daddy about."

She turns her face up to me, with her big round eyes that I just can't resist. "I already did."

I chuckle. "You woke him up just now?"

"Yeah."

"What did he say?"

"He said to ask you."

I laugh hard enough to bounce the kid up and down on my stomach. I can picture the scene very clearly—Tenchi, bleary-eyed and confused, trying to figure out how to tell his little girl that her mother was a demon, and then looking at the clock and realizing that I was probably still awake. I love him, but he can be a jerk when he's low on sleep. "He said to ask me, huh? Okay." I wrap an arm around Mayuka, playing my fingers through her bed-hair. "You do have a mommy, but she's…not around anymore."

"Like Daddy's mommy?"

"Right, like Daddy's mommy. Your mommy was the furry woman in your dream."

She turns her head back down as though she's satisfied, but I know there will be about fifty more questions before she falls asleep, so I just wait. Pretty soon I'm proven right, except this time it's not a question. "I think Mommy wasn't a nice person," she says.

I sigh and hug her more tightly. "That's hard to say, Mayuka. She wasn't very nice to Daddy, or to any of us. But nobody else was nice to her, either, and she was very lonely."

"Nobody was nice to her at all? Not even Daddy or Auntie Sasami?"

"Only one person was ever nice to her, and that was Great Grandpa Katsuhito."

Mayuka looks up at me again, troubled. "Why wasn't anybody else nice to her?"

I smile a little at this, not knowing exactly what's going to come out of my mouth until it does. "Well…we were all very angry with her."

"Why?"

"Because she wasn't very nice to _you_." I watch Mayuka process this for a moment, trying to sort it out, with a peculiar ache in my chest.

"She didn't like me?"

And there it is—the clincher. What am I supposed to say? No little girl should grow up thinking she wasn't made with love, I know that from experience. But I also know it wouldn't be right to lie. "Well, Mayuka…your mommy loved someone once, and she got hurt because of it. So when she made you, she didn't want to get hurt again. She tried to control you, because she was afraid."

"When I was big Mayuka?"

I smile a little; apparently the vague explanations Washu tried to give on Mayuka's origins had partially stuck. "Yeah, when you were big Mayuka."

"Did she make me do bad things?"

This question is quieter than the others; I kiss her forehead, taking a deep breath before I speak. "She tried." Then suddenly I see it—the reason Tenchi sent Mayuka downstairs to me—and I sit up a little, cradling her close. "You know, a long time ago, I had a…well, he was sort of a daddy. He helped Auntie Washu make me. He tried to control me, too. He made me do bad things that I didn't want to."

She looks up at me then, her gaze intense. "What happened?"

"Your daddy saved me, just like he saved you. And now I have a family that loves me."

"Just like me!"

"Just like you."

She settles down against my chest again with a sleepy little sigh. "So you have a mommy but not a bad daddy anymore."

I chuckle at this simplification of my geneaology, thinking of Washu. "Right. Like you have a daddy but not a mean mommy anymore."

"That's okay," she says suddenly, yawning. "I have a you."

"Yeah," I tell her, and I suddenly wonder how I came to be so soft, and how this child came to mean so much. "You have a me." I stroke Mayuka's hair and her back in the flickering light of the TV until her breathing evens out; I should probably bring her back to her bed, but I suddenly can't bear to part with her, so I just wrap her up in my arms until I fall asleep.


End file.
